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Project-based engineering competition in upper-level engineering laboratory

In this paper, I will discuss a project-based competition in an upper-level mechanical engineering laboratory course. I redesigned the course in Fall 2018 to prepare students to make engineering decisions and accomplish design goals. My short-term objectives were to prepare the students to start their capstone projects senior year and improve technical writing. The course introduced static and dynamic beam models and experiments. The project-based competition asked students to use a cantilever beam to measure the mass of an object. The laboratory course focused on learning from failure in the form of writing exercises, peer-editing, and graded progress reports during experiments. Students spent the first 9 weeks of the course following experimental procedures and writing lab reports. In the final project-based competition, the students designed their own set of experiments including finite element analysis and experimental procedures. The students were graded upon their approach to the problem and quantification of uncertainties in measured and predicted values. I awarded a cash prize to the most accurate mass measurement. I will discuss the impacts of the project-based competition on the following year's senior capstone projects and detail the measured improvements in technical writing throughout the semesters in Fall 2018 and Fall 2019. The impacts will be measured based upon a standardized rubric and qualitative interviews.

Topics:

  • Cloud computing:

    • data processing/cleaning

    • statistics and uncertainty

    • curve fitting

  • Numerical modeling

    • finite element analysis

    • convergence

    • verification vs validation

  • Experiments

    • strain gage

    • calipers

    • accelerometers

    • thermocouples

  • Technical writing

    • short documents (<5 pgs, <4 figures)

    • practice quantifying statements

    • learn from failure

    • specification-based grading - lab reports